


shoulder blades are angel wings

by softestrichie



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Autistic Richie Tozier, M/M, eddie has powers and he's thirteen and they're starting to develop, richies helping him figure them out while quietly falling head over heels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-10
Updated: 2019-03-10
Packaged: 2019-11-15 06:04:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18067961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softestrichie/pseuds/softestrichie
Summary: eddie is different, more different than he knows how to cope with. richie is in love.





	shoulder blades are angel wings

**Author's Note:**

> a oneshot that i did in response to a tumblr request for some angel!eddie! <3

“Shoulder-blades are the little humps where your angel wings used to be,” Richie tells Eddie over tuna-and-sweetcorn sandwiches, cross-legged and runny-nosed in the quiet, sandy corner of the schoolyard. The trees are thatched up like rosaline beyond their heads, and there’s a gym lesson after lunch printed neat into their schedules, and, for now, there is almost nothing to worry about. For now, the world is a clean, pink soup bowl; all things clear and round and easy to spot, including the great, velvet-spine picture book between the rings of their knees - the page of it labelled clearly ‘all about the fae’. “If they stick out a ton it means you were a very powerful angel and if not much at all a shitty one. Did you know?”

Eddie looks up over farmhouse crust with young, silver quarter eyes and says, “I didn’t. Where have our wings gone? Why?” 

Twelve years old is one of the most frightening years of Eddie’s life. He’s inching up a teeny tiny bit too tall for his shorts, this year, even the long, clean cotton ones that tickle ‘round his knees and never squeeze his tummy too sore, not even after he’s eaten his potatoes for dinner, and for some of his socks and underwear too. He’s started learning French at school and can count right up to ten, with a wobble here and there (“duh…twah…c-cat?”), and he’s starting to run faster than a lot of the boys in his gym class, even the big, tough ones that all pinch him on the hip and hide his things in the locker room, and his mom’s starting to squeeze his shoulders before bed with a warble of, “now that you’re getting old, little chicken…” That great, transparent soup bowl he’s been swimming through all his childhood is tipping and slipping and emptying out from under his feet nowadays, it’s changing. It’s teaching Eddie more and more by the day, as he grows, that he is not much like other children. And this, naturally, is terrifying. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Richie tells him one time, curled halfway backwards in a headstand behind the benches, trying to help Eddie pick out his hidden pair of pretty blue pants after swimming. Only ones left after class; everyone had gotten bored after Richie’d whisked Eddie up round the hips, crying in his trunks, into the disabled toilet and given him lots of shushes and finger squeezes and nice bits of cheese from his lunch. Off go the freaks, again, off go the nutcases. “They’re just confused ‘cause they look at you and they don’t know how the angels up above ever made a spaghetti so great, and cool and smart and - and cu-ute. They look at you and they can’t understand why they’re not and won’t ever be half as fan-tabbie-tastic!”

“Thanks, Chee,” comes Eddie’s shy little flutter, taking one hand away from his tummy to take his pants and dusting all pink ‘round his nose - another change. Another thing about his life that just won’t make sense anymore; why Richie Tozier makes him feel like his insides are made of chocolate pudding. “Think I’m just weird.”

“You’re different. Still my best friend forever and ever, though.”

Eddie gives him a hopeful twitch of that blushing nose, like a shepherd puppy, and Richie flashes it back as a ‘yes, really’, with a meek little, “still a human being,” just to firm it all up. A human being; what a simple, clean-cut thing to be. What a tidy little box to fit in. 

But twelve years old, more worryingly than ever, will tug even this out from under him, too. Twelve years old will teach Eddie that he has never been anything closer to a human being. Teach him he’s feisty and fast and quite good at drawing and ice skating and forward rolls on the playing field when his momma’s not watching, and that he doesn’t really, properly, belong on planet earth.  No, Eddie Kaspbrak is something made of sunshine and peony-stalks and is absolutely nothing like any of the boys in his grade at all. 

Eddie Kaspbrak, at twelve years old, has never felt so alone. 

It starts in the summertime; the one where his momma is more worried and shaky-fingered and pursed in the lips than ever. The sun and the grass, that’s what he thought it was; sunshine and lawn-mowers and Richie Tozier knocking at the front door sunburnt red as a Maine lobster, asking, “hiya, missus Kay! Will you let Eddie come on the backa my bike?!” Of course, Mrs. Kaspbrak did fret herself hoarse over these things, but not just ‘cause of hay fever or tiring out her son’s ‘poor, growing’ legs. Been trying to squash something out of him since the day he was born and maybe, just maybe, Eddie will think when he’s older and wiser, it’s a little something like magic. Less afraid of vomit and more of something coiled right up strong, in those angel wing shoulder blades. Something that’ll take his feet off the ground, send pink stellar winds ‘round the back of the moon. Something you’d read about on that special, curly-cornered, ‘all about the fae’ page, clear as day.

Richie runs a shy pinky finger over the length of the left one, the left shoulder blade, on the last day of twelve years old; the day before Eddie Kaspbrak’s rather miserable thirteenth birthday party. Cold carrot cake and pats on the hair from his aunts, and getting further and further away from life being simple; further away from still a human being. “I can’t feel anything,” Richie says awkwardly, as though touching a boy half as pretty as Eddie Kaspbrak, magic or not, could ever be described this way. They’re sitting at the quarry with yet more sandwiches and some proper lemonade, the kind that’s actually the colour of lemons, from Maggie Tozier’s kitchen. “You’re sure you felt wings back there?”

Eddie shakes his head. “Not wings. Like…energy. Like pins and needles but electric, you know?”

“I think so…?”

“Listen to me, Richie!”

He yanks the red-thread hem of his t shirt back from around his armpits to down ‘cross his hips and turns to face the taller boy, who seems to be changing a little bit too. His nose is looking bigger and there’s three more pimples down the crook of it since last time Eddie had chanced a guilty little look. Hair a bit longer and thicker and unholier and shoulders a bit rounder; looks very embarrassed by all of it, from the colour of his cheeks. “I’ve been feeling things in ‘em, ever since what you told me. And sometimes I feel it in my fingers and toes…like I’m ‘bout to go shooting up in the air or something. I swear, s’like a horror movie.”

Eddie is telling the truth, as his momma always forced out him with strong, soapy hands. Feels it when he goes to bed against the scratch of his mattress and feels it through the silk over the backs his jammies. Feels it when he’s running around at the weekends, when his fingers are whirling ‘round in happy little circles by his hips and he couldn’t possibly feel shy or worried or sad about anything, and all of a sudden his heels itch on the cusp of flying right off the face of the earth. Eddie feels himself growing into a teenage boy, and something else, too; something from the forest. Eddie is growing into an angel, while everybody else’s bones are growing away from it. 

“Maybe you should try it now. Try and conjure up some…some pick ‘n’ mix candy, or something,” Richie offers, seriously, although it admittedly sounds a little silly. He gives Eddie’s wrists a touch with his thumbs to try explain this. To try say sorry. 

“Not sure how I do it.”

“Close your eyes ‘n’ think about it? Stand up or something.” Richie gets to his feet as to enthuse his teeny tiny faerie a little bit, hitching his equally too-small shorts out from the bands of his underwear and giving a jerk of the knees. Funny, it’s always been him with the great, old-fashioned fairytale books clutched right up against his heart; always him who throws himself down to his tummy near every little green toadstool, every daisy flower, every hole in the ground with a, “say hi to the pixies, Spaghetti! Tell them hi!” Always been him drawing dragons and werewolves and mermaids on all the corners of his test papers, always having it torn out of his hands by the teacher and held above his head, always getting it seen by the whole class and getting subsequently twenty, sticky kids’ worth of pencils sharpenings and rubber shavings thrown at him in a fit of giggles. And, now, here he is on the rocks, with his own Eddie Kaspbrak all scrunched up in the eyes and at the tip of his nose, waiting for fairy dust to come flying out of his fingers. Waiting for lights behind the clouds, a puff of smoke, a ring of a bell. Here he is in a fairytale of his own. 

“Nothing’s happening,” comes Eddie’s grumpy little protest, although his eyes and nose are still wrinkled. ‘Bout to pull them wide open and giggle all nervously about how this is the silliest thing they’ve done, out of all the incredibly silly contenders, and carry on through their sandwiches and lemonade, carry on and try to shrug this whole angel-wing business off his rosy shoulders. But the air has gone just a touch cooler, despite the lack of breeze, just now, and Richie’s hands have very slowly come to seal around his wrists like Christmas wreaths. Richie’s holding him and whispering, “give yourself a little chance, Eddie,” and all of a sudden, he doesn’t think he can ever move again. 

Richie is nervous about touching. He goes to the doctors a lot, you see, and they give him lots of papers and special weekly challenges and his mom lots of hushed top tips - “I’m artistic!” He’d mispronounced through his missing front teeth as an eight year old, clapping his hand to his chest as though pinning on a little badge of honour. “You hear that Eddie? Artistic, very special.” And all being ‘artistic’ had him ever want to do was feel, and touch, and grab, and tickle, until he grew a teeny tiny bit older, and this became something very funny amongst all the boys in his grade. When apparently squeezing everyone you meet by the chin and pinching their ears and pawing through their lunch bags was apparently not an appropriate way of saying ‘hello’ at all anymore; when every day became an embarrassed little challenge to touch as rarely as possible. But there are his fingers, clear as day, on the top of that boy he really thinks he’d die for’s. There is all of the love in Richie Tozier’s heart, stirring up warm since he was born, sewn thick between them now like hemstitch. 

And it’s enough; it’s enough to tease whatever it is so hellbent on making Eddie Kaspbrak an utter alien compared to everybody else, whatever’s so transfixed on him behind the arch of the sun, into budging. When the skin behind Eddie’s ears goes sweaty and tickly from the sheer adoration; when every teeny tiny ounce of him curls up tight and cries, ‘thank God for Richie Tozier! Thank God he’s so beautiful!’, that’s when the breeze comes. And his toes twist inside the stitch of his socks and his little brown brogues scuffle and all of a sudden, he is floating by just one, clean inch off the ground. 

Richie half-chokes when his own eyes come flitting open behind his spectacles; his tongue hangs halfway down his chin and his shoulders shake but, God, he can only hold on tighter. He can only pull his tummy in closer to the floating, pearly-cheeked boy up above him, right against the frightened curves of his knees, and mumble, “you really are an angel.”

And after just a silent second, after half a breeze, Eddie is coming back down to earth with sun-flushed cheeks and jittery hips, and a smile on his face. Something so frightening had never happened to the pair of them; never seeped through their safe little wall of dinner at 5 o’ clock and the round table at lunch and Saturday morning cartoons over breakfast. Never anything that confused their little order of things so much. But, with Richie holding on nice and tight and the water shining sage, Eddie wears a smile bright as heaven, curling past a titter of, “maybe I’ll be yours, huh? Guardian angel.” 

Richie doesn’t think he’ll ever stop falling in love, with that idea; he doesn’t think he’ll ever stop falling in love with Eddie Kaspbrak. “Yes. Yes please.” 

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr - lovedrichie  
> Instagram - pixielesbian


End file.
